Journalist‐Law Panel Advises Broad Protection for Newsmen

Warning that “the nation cannot afford” to let freedom of the press erode, a panel of journalists and law officials called yesterday for broad legal shields to protect newsmen and news agencies from governmental efforts to secure their confidential information.

It recommended also that there be an absolute ban against prepublication restraint of the press by government, and that the police refrain from two “regrettably widespread” practices—masquerading as reporters and paying reporters for information.

And, it said, the so‐called underground press should be accorded the same rights as the more established media—rather than the “double standard” under which, the group said, “some law‐enforcement officials have used their official authority against the underground press in a way in which it would never have been invoked against the established press.”

The panel was assembled last February by the Twentieth Century Fund, an independent research group, to investigate the growing conflicts between press and government.

Its members include a judge, a prosecutor and the executive director of the American Bar Association; Mike Wallace of the Columbia Broadcastin System; George E. Reedy, the, former press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Thomas K. Forcade, the Washington representative for the Underground Press Syndicate, who was recently denied press credentials to the White House.

It was Mr. Forcade's type of news media that the panel described as “underground” — a category, it said, that included about 300 or 350 newspapers, and 200 or so less regularly appearing publications, all of which “share a style that is irreverent, tolerant of some drugs, explicit about sex, oriented toward the political left and consistently anti‐Establishment.”

In its report, the panel noted an “increasing hostility and a widening credibility gap between the government and the press and between the press and the public,” but it added that the press had not been “blameless.”

Made Itself “Vulnerable’

The press has made itself “vulnerable,” the group stated, “by years of irresponsible scrambling for reader and viewer attention.” Often, it said, the press has lacked “basic understanding,” accepted “handout information and has had a “misdirected passion” for headlines and scoops.

But it blamed the Government as well.

“Unfortunately,” the task force report says. “Vice President Spiro T. Agnew's criticisms, which created so much perturbation among the media and so much approbation among the sections of the public, has not helped matters. On the contrary, his attacks increased the acrimony and suspicion.”

At a news conference yesterday, members of the panel insisted—in response to reporters’ questions — that the group had not been assembled to “take on” the Nixon Administration. Nor, they said, was there any “plot” by the Administration to muzzle the press.

Numerous factors have contributed to the rise in “tensions” between press and government, they said—the discontent over the Vietnam war, for instance, and the increasing divisiveness of society in general. And, said Mr. Reedy the adversary stance between press and government is “traditional” and “probably a healthy thing.”

In its report, however, the panel noted that lately there were “new and potentially corrosive frictions” between press and government.

Giving recent examples of each, the report cited five areas that posed “some degree of damage to press freedom”: the increasing use of subpoenas against journalists; policemen posing as newsmen; “official harassment” of underground journalists; governmental investigation in the regulated broadcast media; and, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers attempted prior restraint of publications.”

The panel urged new laws to allow reporters to refuse subpoenas seeking the names of confidential news sources or information that those sources have provided.

The shield, or “newsman's privilege,” suggested by the panel would protect both the names of the sources and any tape recordings, notes or photographs containing confidential information.

Other members of the panel arc:

Robert Williamson, chairman, former Chief Justice of Maine.

Jack Bass, The Charlotte Observer.

Ralph de Toledano, columnist.

Bert H. Early, executive director of the American Bar Association.

Norman Isaacs, editor‐in‐residence, Columbia University.

L. F. Palmer Jr., columnist.

Roger Rook, District Attorney of Clackamas County, Oregon.

Howard B. Woods, editor and publisher, St. Louis Sentinel.

Shirley Hufstedler, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, was on the panel, but resigned this summer because of a possible conflict of interest.

Fred P. Graham, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, was rapporteur for the panel. He took no part, however, in the report's section on the Pentagon Papers.

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A version of this archives appears in print on November 17, 1971, on Page 35 of the New York edition with the headline: Journalist‐Law Panel Advises Broad Protection for Newsmen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe